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Quotes

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944